Rep. Nancy Pelosi Promises To Overturn 'Citizens United' If We Give Her Back The House

[theKed]

113. On Corporations

You are correct in your statement that a corporation is a 'legal fiction', and that the definition isn't found the constitution or any founding documents - but is a convenient and useful fiction. The phenomenon of the corporation predates those documents by a great length of time, based in the English common law that the American system was based off of, and incorporated many aspects of - the entity of corporation being one. Now, to say that corporations are not mentioned in the documents you mention (as opposed to being defined, as such), is simply not true. The legal precedent predating those documents define a corporation as a person. This is a bit of an odd thing for some people to wrap their head around, but there are two sorts of persons: the generic "person" that can be any sort of legal entity and a "natural person" which is explicitly only human beings. These two have different legal protections and rights.

But, why should their corporations at all? A corporation is, in some ways, best to be viewed as a nexus of contracts, an entity that contains them and provides a way of addressing dealings to and from those contracts. Arranging things this way allows business and legal protection and avenues for people dealing with this collections of contracts. With the advent of 'limited liability' corporations, the field of investment becomes feasible - prior to this creation, anyone buying shares of a company would be equally liable for the entire corporation, not a very safe venture to be sure.

To say a corporation has no loyalty to anything but profit is a bit disingenuous, however. It's more accurate to say a corporation has no loyalty to anything at all. There is no brain, no consciousness, no active decision making in the corporate entity. It is an empty vessel that the people running it fill with their own motivations and desires. Corporations allow things like the modern city to be functional, without being a machine for profit. Charitable organizations are explicitly and legally bound to be non-profit. If a corporation strives to optimize profit at the expense of workers down the line, that blame lies entirely at the feet of those running the corporation.

I've gone on before about why and how to curtail corporate activity, specifically in the arena of politics. The summation is that a rewriting of the typographical errors in the 14th amendment would break the corporate stranglehold on elections, as well as the overturning of several notable SCOTUS rulings. There's more that would need to be done to make politics equitable again, but that's a good start.